


Red Handed

by orphan_account



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series, 悪魔城ドラキュラX 追憶の夜想曲 | Castlevania: Nocturne of Recollection
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, M/M, Meet-Cute, Post-Season/Series 03, Rating May Change, Self-Indulgent, Slow Burn, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23035267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: More books are out of place, a small stack of them sit on the floor with a half melted candle keeping them company. The flame has long since been extinguished.Someone's been in the Belmont hold.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Lyudmil, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

Someone's been in the hold. 

Alucard enters it one morning, a duster in hand and a frown on his face and confusion lodged in his brow; the lights are on for some reason. It wasn't him, certainly, he isn't one to make that kind of mistake, as small as it is and as fallible as he can be. No, he shuts them off each time he leaves, remembers pointedly to grasp that lever and swing it back down before he absconds for the afternoon. The lights aren't his only source of evidence, there are books askew not far from the ledger, and the ledger itself is wide open to a page he doesn't recognize. He thinks for a minute, as he stands there completely dumbfounded, that maybe it was Sypha or Trevor, that maybe they had come back for a brief moment, that maybe they were still here. 

But that's wishful thinking, he won't let himself be so naive. 

Alarm rips through him instead- whoever they were, they figured out how to use the elevator. Whoever they were, they have an interest in objects made to hunt night creatures; it's a fact that in no way reassures him. 

They wanted to do the same, Takka and Sumi; he tries not to dwell on how that turned out. 

He does anyway.

It's been months, but he's still so raw. It hurts too much, no matter how much time has passed or how he distracts himself. He's considered taking their bodies down, burying them because seeing them just hurts. Then he remembers the fear of all it happening again, and so he leaves them up; they putrefy while he rots a little on the inside with them. His solitude ensures he will never forget them, that he will continue dying from the inside out. His only solace is the lack of any visitors, he's even more alone than before in all the time they've been dead.

Until suddenly he isn't; there's a rat running around his home, and he's determined to drive them out too before the inevitable comes to pass. 

Blood will not stain his hands again, nor his anyone else's. 

-

The second morning he walks into the hold, more things are out of place, to the point of him assuming for a time that his culprit is squatting there. He turns the hold upside down, sifts through aisles and floors of parchment and dust and bone, he comes up empty save more evidence of a little leech. 

More books out of place, a small stack of them on the floor with a half melted candle keeping them company. The flame has long since been extinguished, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it hadn't been long ago at all. 

His squatter was here maybe less than a few hours ago, they must have left in the early morning. If only he'd had the willpower to drag himself out of bed this morning, he might have caught them. 

-

It's bizarre, how his anxiety over his unwanted guest mounts with each day but how he refuses to do anything about it. The fear of confrontation swims within him, the terror of really being alone- being in a place that he solely inhabits. 

He needs something around, something that isn't him. With each passing day he dies a little, he goes a hair more mad. 

So he let's them stay, whoever they are. He doesn't complain to himself when he re-shelves their books and closes the ledger and sweeps up muddy tracks. They're a remarkably stupid guest, not even trying to hide their comings and goings. 

Such a thought gives Alucard pause as he cleans, he worries that maybe it's all in his head. It's so obvious, too obvious, like maybe it can't really be happening at all.

Once the seeds of doubt are sewn, they're very hard to remove. 

He doesn't check on the hold for a week, he's bedridden with an emotion he hasn't a name for.

Only after hours of attempting to roll himself out of his room does he conjure it in his mind. 

Shame is what he calls it, he feels shame at his own lack of motivation, his loneliness, the way they've forced their way under his flesh and deep into his bones. 

The hold was his greatest comfort in the early days of his solitude, but it feels perverted now. Someone has breached that sanctuary, they keep doing it, and he can't find it in himself to stop them.

He's pathetic.

He even let it be tainted once before, when he'd brought  _ them _ into it with him. The association in his head didn't come until later, of them soiling a place of rest and promise, a place of yellowing paper and the smell of glue. The hold was once sacred to him. 

Now he feels on edge being in it, like he doesn't own the place, like someone else loves here now. He feels evicted from his own gift, a gift he values even if the one who gave it to him will surely never return now. Sypha and Trevor will be a memory; he had come to terms with that just after- 

He won't think of their names anymore, he'll focus on the muddy bricks beneath his hands, on the harsh sound of fabric against stone. Scrubbing on his hands and knees, back and forth and back and forth, he can almost sync his breathing to the movement, he can almost calm down. 

Though the thudding in his chest, and the sudden sight of a knife by a bookshelf tells him he will never be calm again. 

It's a little thing, basically a letter opener without any fancy hilt, pure iron and completely useless against him or just about anyone. His guest must have dropped it, and for the sake of not exposing himself, he leaves it where he finds it.

It's with a heavy heart that he dictates that to be the final straw. 

-

He doesn't leave the hold that day, he spends hours thinking and psyching himself up for what will surely be a shitshow. If not a bloodbath, it'll be a travesty; yet his curiosity is so great, and the need for relief from this anxiety is so poignant that he can't help himself. When he feels himself grow tired, he slams down the switch, and every little bulb of lightning in the room gradually fades to nothing. 

The dark is not kind- it leaves him alone with his thoughts in the cruelest way.

It's worth it when he can hear the elevator turn on high above him through packed earth walls, and the gentle pitter-patter of steps. Night has fallen then, perhaps faster than he had anticipated, and soon his guest is back at the door, swinging it open slowly with a resounding creak. 

Alucard's heart beats like the hooves of a horse against a racetrack, it's all he can hear over the gentle breath of the intruder. They don't even notice him, not as they sigh out a breath of (what sounds like) excitement and their hand makes contact with his chest-

He's standing in front of the light switch, he had decided to do so very deliberately. Now he feels like it was a mistake, their touch- even as its ripped away at lightning speed- lingers on him and leaves him immobile.

How long has it been since another person touched him?

The question keeps him rooted, stops him from pursuing them. Gears are turning, their steps disappear rapidly, he doesn't go after them. He hadn't even been able to see much of them in the dark, his tunnel vision was too great. Now he's alone again, and even if his goal at the start of this had been to drive them out, he horrified by the fact that they're likely never coming back again. 

He'll be alone.


	2. Chapter 2

Stumbling upon the place itself had been an accident entirely; he'd been searching for the castle, not the ruins beside it. He found them nevertheless, nestled close by a contraption unlike anything he's ever seen. He's baffled by it, the complex rigging of wood and rope all woven together to form… something. He isn't quite sure. 

Lyudmil has a hard time with mechanical things like this, he's never been of the handy sort. Perhaps that's why he triggers the contraption on accident, his lack of knowledge, the idea that when levers are bumped into, something turns on or off or moves-

How is he to know, he doesn't even know what this thing is. He does know what a hole is though, and that's what he descends into.

Miles of a broken staircase go around the walls, banister destroyed and gaping holes littering the place. It's otherwise unremarkable save the patches of soot and the single painting he spots on his way down. Fancy looking thing, frame laced in gold. He looks at it in awe the same way he had the contraption once it started to make its way down. It's dark, pitch black passed a door of solid wood that he struggles to even open. A hand shoots out to touch the wall in the uncertainty of the darkness, and within a second it makes contact with cold metal. A strange shape- a hinge of some kind that's very hard to push. Against perhaps his better judgement, he flips it up. A heart attack nearly takes him at twenty, light filling the room in a burst so alarming he cries out.

Majestic, opulent, terrifying- the room is bigger than any structure he's even found himself in. That's only half his surprise, the other part made up of the shocking glow lining the room- fire in a bottle, light that had been instant. He's never seen this, never been more impressed in his simple little life. The books are only the third most shocking thing about the place, just the sheer number of them alone is beyond Lyudmil. So much writing, so many scribes, so much knowledge all in one place. The stairs beckon him down, call to him to go explore-

Though it strikes him that this isn't his home, he knows not what this place even is. 

Judging by the thin layer of dust collecting on the banister, he assumes this place has long since been abandoned.

He goes to town on the place. 

There's a ledger at the bottom of the stairs, propped up on a lectern and ready to be cracked open. Lyudmil's fingers itch, the urge to run down and grab at it so great. When he gives in, he promises himself this is a luxury he can afford to give himself only for tonight. He'll leave before morning, just in case he's wrong about this place being abandoned. Not that he's usually wrong about much.

He slides down the railing- stumbles at the bottom, and cracks open the ledger. 

He can't resist it.

The whole thing is organized, yellowed pages mottled with mold hold lines and lines of a system he can barely hope to decipher. The topics are bizarre- he doesn't know what alchemy is, or what any of these names mean. 

Slogra, Cagnazzo, Scarmilione, Flea man- are these names? He can't be sure. There are pages and pages of books listed under these names. The only one he recognizes is one towards the end. "Lilith," he mumbles, he's seen that name before, or heard it in a sermon. Always a bad omen that name, though he hardly remembers the story behind it. Never once has he paid attention in church, and he's not about to start either. He bypasses the bizarre names in the ledger, the books under them that must surely explain what they are. They don't interest him. 

The ledger moves through more or less mundane things, they must be fictional books, the ones under "magic," those don't interest him either. A shudder runs through him, he flips back and forth for a minute, thinking. He wants to look for it, though it feels wrong-

He finds it in bold, a whole section of a dozen pages all its own. "Science…" he mumbles aloud to the empty room. It feels like a sin.

His pastor would tell him it's exactly that. 

-

Within the hour he's eaten through half a tome, two scrolls, and a small collection of miniature notebooks. The tome is on plants- medication he will never use for injuries he will likely never have, ones that need wraps and sutures and more medical attention than he can learn in one sitting. The floor is cold under him, but his cloak keeps his shoulders warm like a hug that can't be matched. Heavy wool scratches at his exposed skin, he ignores it in favor of turning a page. 

The science section of the hold is small compared to the rest. Everything else is in another language- not literally, it's just nonsensical. He's never heard of these things, these creatures that a million billion scrolls and books clamor on about. The skulls and things- other bones and remains, skins and feathers and horns, they litter the room's back cabinets, they must have belonged to those creatures. Lyudmil thinks this place must have belonged to a taxidermist, a zoologist, one of those fancy european scientists he knows exists but has never seen. It would explain the fire encased in glasses, if not magic then it must be science. 

And the jewels and jems- he's never seen so many valuable looking things in one place. Opalescent necklaces, bronze armor, chains and chains of jewelry and mail- he finds a book at some point that states they have special properties. It's hogwash, it has to be, but it's interesting to read through.

He reads for another hour, finishes out the tome and heaves it back onto the shelf where he thinks he remembers it being. No one will miss a book out of place in such a big library- he very much doubts anyone is here. Yet when day rises, he makes sure to leave. He covers his presence up anyways, even though the threat of discovery feels slim, one can never be too careful. 

Books go back, oddities are carefully arranged again, he does his best to close the tome and slide it into where it was. He exits the place, thinking of the books and the dust and the strange objects and all.

It draws him back the next night.

-

He only means to go back once more, but soon it becomes a routine.

The lift, as he's taken to calling it, is still up when he gets there and still functioning even in the dreadful snow. It hasn't been cleared off, which only assuages his fears of intruding on someone or something. The library is abandoned, he feels the need to remind himself of that every single night he goes there. The castle he's unsure of; he won't venture close to it anymore, not after he'd seen pikes out front. He'd been curious initially, now he's simply afraid. He'd run right into it too, blinded by the night and his steadily fading lamp- a body too putrefied to recognize, mostly bone and sinew left. Shock had hit him so hard that he hadn't even realized it was a body until he was almost at the lift. 

Remembering it now makes him sick.

The hold has books on what to do with a body, they're all nonsense too. Burning it, staking it, those things don't sound right at all. Bodies are meant to be buried, he thinks, not strung up on pikes like that-

He can't think on it too hard, he'll vomit. 

He thinks instead of who must be up in that castle. It's not far from the hold, not from what he can tell in the dead of night anyways, maybe the two structures are connected. Except that idea pumps anxiety into his veins, the idea that he could be on a stick too if he's not careful. Maybe they were intruders too, those bodies. Maybe they took advantage of the bottled fire and the walls of parchment and the interesting, amazing place that is the subterranean oasis.

He promises himself, in the light of the moon on his walk back home, never to stay long enough to find out. 

-

Lyudmil needs to stop lying to himself.

He goes back every night for a week, unbothered by his sudden lack of sleep or the productivity he needs in his precious hours of daylight. It's affecting his work back home, not that he cares much for serving mass and cleaning up a church.

His anxiety over the bodies is gone, he avoids looking in the direction of the castle for too long now. The right thing to do would be to bury them, to cut them down, whoever they were, and give them a proper rest; except Lyudmil thinks he knows better than to venture close. He doesn't want to end up there with them.

Surely they deserved it, whoever they were…

He lets the strange objects in front of him distract him; a cloak of gossamer and an old set of quills- he can't for the life of him stop looking at them. The quills are from no bird he's ever seen, though he doesn't travel often. Perhaps it's a foriegn bird. The cloak on the other hand is strange, it shimmers like stars. 

His catholic guilt is the only thing that keeps him from swiping anything from this place, that and plausible deniability. If he shows up in town with a cart full of valuable oddities, his neighbors would surely say he's gone mad and robbed a graveyard. Besides, if ever the hold had a caretaker, they would notice. Lyudmil has never been more convinced that this place does indeed have one. Things move now. The taxidermy tangle of snakes has been moved, there are no longer books random in piles, one of the shelves has been repaired- the library shows signs of life distinctly separate from him, and it's more than frightening to think about. He's not just romping around an abandoned building anymore, he's intruding completely.

He only prays he won't be killed for it, at this point he knows he'll never be able to stop.

-

It's unusual for the lights to be gone, for the fire to not already be burning when he enters the hold. It's happened only once before, when he first came in and had to throw the switch to get that magic to reveal itself. 

So he reaches for the switch again, except it's not there. In its place is fabric pulled taught against a hard chest- fabric that's soft and fine and clingy, the fabric a nobleman would swathe himself in or maybe a crazy lord about to impale him on a stake. Lyudmil takes no chances and hesitates for not even a second before running. 

The lift feels too slow, he practically bounces in anxiety as it slowly crawls back up the hole.

He'll be back again someday, likely before he remembers how lucky he is to be alive. 

**Author's Note:**

> Season 3 got me so fucked up that I took a character from probably the most obscure piece of CV canon and I forcibly shoved him into the story for the sake of catharsis. Alucard deserves a friend and a nice day and I'm gonna give it to him Goddamn it.


End file.
